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April 24, 2018

The third week in April of 2018, I was fortunate to be part of a group gathered in the hopes of sharing information, ideas, and plans to achieve better broadband in the state of North Carolina.

We go to conferences to be with people who think like we do. When you get together with your tribe, it energizes you. People talk your language. They value the same things that you do. Sometimes conferences come up with ideas that lead to change.

I came back feeling like there were lots of people who believe what I believe. None of the people at the conference needed to be convinced of the importance of high-quality broadband in North Carolina's future. They were all trying to understand how they could make it happen. They also understood almost to a person that most of us do not have competition in broadband. Usually, we have a choice of one provider and often their offerings are designed more for entertainment than for business usage.

I love the analogy given by Grant Goings, the city manager, from Wilson, NC. Wilson for those who do not know built their own fiber network only to have the state legislature try to make it illegal. While they finally got grandfathered, lobbyists made it impossible for other cities to do what Wilson has done.

Grant told us to imagine that we lived on private dirt toll road owned by a company. He said to think about going to the private company and begging them to pave your road only to have them say no because it would not make them more money. Then he said suppose you went out and built your own superhighway right beside the dirt toll road only to have the state legislature tell you that you couldn't drive on it and had to keep driving on the dirt road. Those are the roadblocks Wilson had to overcome. I think we were told that 650 technology jobs have come to town in the last year. They credit their fiber network and competitively priced fast Internet access.

This conference was all about helping communities figure out ways to build their own fiber superhighways so that their citizens will not be left behind as cities get better and better connections to the Internet. The important thing to remember is that those communities who work to build their own community networks often end up with better connectivity than cities around them. That means this is not a battle that rural communities have lost yet. It is battle that will be lost unless people mobilize and demand their leaders takes steps to bring fiber to their communities. It does not take forever to get fiber. Our company built 23 miles of fiber in Bozeman, Montana in six months.

Just as the Interstate Highway system and the railroads before it created winners and losers, the world of fiber is going to leave communities behind. Places like Danville, Virginia jumped on the fiber bandwagon over a decade ago. They had been hit by the perfect storm of a collapse of the furniture, tobacco, and textile industries that defined their economy. Their electric utility built a fiber network and now Danville has a thriving economy with far more technology jobs than in the past.

I am lucky to work in a job that aligns with my passion for better broadband with my job description. The company that I work for has been helping communities take control of their economic future by working towards community controlled networks for twenty-five years. It is easy to wake up in the morning and go to work doing something that can make a real difference in people's lives.

Like the analogy that was used at the conference, this is a lot like rural electrification. The cities got electricity because it was easy for private companies to make a profit there. It was much harder outside the cities because the customers were much farther apart. That is why we had the Rural Electrification Act. There is no simple answer for each community but there are answers and solutions that be put in place to position a community for the future without breaking the bank. The good news is that banks and others are starting to understand how fiber is to a community's future.

Fiber also makes financial sense for individual users. I have done the numbers time and again. If I could switch to one of the community networks that we have built, any upfront costs that I pay would be covered in fifteen months by the resulting savings from my getting out of the grip of the cable monopoly. After that initial period, my savings quickly start to mount up. Connecting a home to fiber is a better investment than remodeling your kitchen.

I remain optimistic that North Carolina will take up this challenge which former Governor Hunt likened to the challenge of getting all the state's dirt roads paved. I lived on a dirt road so I can relate. I remember the roads of my childhood being paved and I remember before they were paved that school had to be canceled in the winter sometimes because the roads were too muddy for buses.

This conference was a refreshing change for a year that seems destined to be defined by not so nice politics. Not a single person during the conference mentioned a party label. I did not have a clue about the political stripe of the one state representative who spoke. Even if I had not known, it would have been a safe bet to assume the former governor, James Hunt, who spoke was a Democrat. NC has only elected three Republican governors in the last one hundred years. I also knew our current governor, Roy Cooper, was a Democrat but none of that mattered since everyone was focused on the issue at hand, better broadband.

I hope this is a sign that everyone can work together on issues that have the potential to change our lives for the better.

December 02, 2017

Not long ago I attended a meeting. I have a history of over four decades of meetings as an adult. These gatherings are a necessary part of life and have been around for a long time. Even the word, meeting, dates back to 1510. Getting together in a group gives people a chance to hear what the group is doing and often to speak their mind. If you are lucky, the person speaking sticks to the issues before the meeting. Unfortunately there is usually someone who heads off on a tangent which has more to do with their personal agenda than the agenda of the meeting.

In this most recent meeting, a person got stuck on the idea that the person acting as president of the organization deserved respect. We all understood that what was really being said was that the president of the organization deserved respect no matter what he or she was doing. Unfortunately the history of the organization is that two of the last three presidents have resigned because they were not doing what they were supposed to be doing. They had the idea that they could do whatever they wanted because they were president. What respect we might have had for them going into the office, they threw away while in office.

In the case of our organization, doing whatever they wanted including operating in secret with no open meetings for the community and providing no timely minutes of their closed meetings. It also included in one case trying to provide favoritism to a couple of lot owners and in another case spending a big chunk of the community's money without seeking any comment from the community ahead of time.

I am all for not micro-managing organizations that are elected to do a job. I appreciate people stepping up to the plate in volunteer organizations, but no one should take a job and ignore the way that the job is supposed to be done. If you want to do a job well, learn from those who have successfully done the job before you, do not assume that you can rewrite the rules to suit your own personal preferences. If you take the job and complain about how hard it is or try to convince the rest of us that you are a martyr, then you obviously did not understand the job in the first place.

I can guarantee you that I will always respect a great blue heron like the one pictured. I have been close enough to one to wonder whether or not I might be on the list of potential targets. Humans operate much more subtly. Still, I will always respect the office of president, vice president, secretary, or treasurer because I know from experience how much work goes into fulfilling the responsibilities of those jobs. However that is different than automatically and unconditionally respecting the person in the office. When a person takes one of those offices, that person has to earn my respect and trust. They will always start with the residual respect that comes with the office, but very quickly their words must translate into actions and actions must prove the capability of the person to hold that office and effectively discharge the duties of the office fairly and with the interest of the whole community taken into consideration.

If every office holder were competent and did their job as well as a great blue heron hunts, it would be a different story. Experience has taught me that more often than we care to admit, we put our trust in people who have done little to earn it. In corporate America we do not have a choice, but when we vote people ino an office, we always have the option of voting them out. Some of our recent organizations have had board members that have resigned more than once in single year. If you cannot make it through a term without resigning, please spare us your expertise.

September 23, 2016

There are parts of your life and people that have a huge impact on the person that you become.

I remain proud that I was a Boy Scout when growing up. After many years I also can look back on my years in military school at McCallie with fondness. The McCallie motto of Honor, Truth, and Duty has been as much a part of my being as Harvard's motto of Veritas (Truth). My years at Harvard were a time when our country seemed to be ripping apart at the seams, but I remain convinced that our country's foundations handled the challenge of the sixties and seventies without breaking and were stronger after all the turmoil.

It used to be a joke in our family that my mother would give a friend or family member almost anything that they asked for that she had. She was never one for letting things be stuffed away unused in the attic or even under-used somewhere in the house. She was always happy when useful homes were found for things in storage. Life was for living and accumulating stuff was not part of her plan for happiness. Mother was also not very forgiving about donations that were wasted. My father once gave the Mount Airy YMCA a $20,000 donation. They used the money for a parking lot and mother thought they could have done much more with the money. She never forgot or forgave them.

Considering my background, perhaps it is not too surprising that I became disenchanted with politics in the early seventies. It was a time of assassinations and Watergate. It was also a time when I felt like that I did not know myself. I took a chance and went off to Canada. With $6,000 from my mother, I bought a home and farm on the shores of the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia. My father helped with a few thousand for a farm tractor and some equipment and I went back to the land for three years. There were a few cows, two Labrador retrievers, tons of hay and lots of gardening. Of necessity I learned to do almost everything from copper plumbing to electrical wiring and building cabinets.

About two years into my back to the land experiment, I made a trip down to the states to help a college roommate get married just outside of Boston. From there I wandered down to Washington to visit a college friend. The trip to Washington convinced me I had made the right decision to move to Canada. After Washington I headed down to Mount Airy where my mother was living. With the help of a blind date, I was smitten and ended up marrying a wonderful North Carolina lady a few months latter. I convinced her to come back to Nova Scotia with me.

Once there is someone else in your life, it is impossible not to think about others. In 1974, my wife, our two retrievers, the tractor, several cats and all our belongings moved to a farm in Tay Creek, New Brunswick. There I learned almost everything I had not learned in Nova Scotia. While more cattle came first (eventually the herd numbered 200 Angus), the children showed up within a few years. Our three children had the most impact on my worldview. It is impossible to have children and not care about the world where they will grow up. With children you get involved with all sorts of things like Sunday school, Brownies, Cub Scouts, soccer, hockey, and even schools especially when they are threatened.

Our children in the end were what brought us back to the United States. Even after we moved off the farm to Halifax, Nova Scotia and I went to work for Apple, we still loved living in Canada. We had great friends and enjoyed the relative tranquility of Canada. I still remember the story of the one bank robbery that we had in the small town of Stanley that was near our farm. The bank robber came in and was told the safe was on a timer and he would have to wait for it to open. The teller asked him if he would like a cup of tea and being Canadian he said yes. The teller made the tea, called the RCMP, and after the robber finished his tea and left with the money, he was picked up on the one road that led out of town. We left Canada not because of Canada but because we thought our children would have better opportunities in the States.

We first moved to Columbia, Maryland, but quickly figured out that we needed a place closer to our roots so within a couple of years we were living on the side of a mountain in Roanoke, Virginia. There in the Roanoke Valley we found a great Presbyterian Church (to match my years in a Presbyterian military school), wonderful schools, and friends that still delight us. Still my Apple job was a pressure cooker and the little time that I had was often dedicated to family and staying sane. In 2000 my mother moved in with us in Roanoke and we became part of the sandwich generation.

By 2006, my mother had passed away and I was gone from Apple and its unethical culture. That year we found a new place to heal from the wounds of the corporate world. The Crystal Coast has been a dream place to be, and as the pressures of work eased up after my departure from Apple, I was able to start volunteering to help others on a consistent basis instead of just being a good Samaritan when I cleaned their driveways with a snowblower, helped dig graves, or pulled folks out of snow drifts. I learned a lot in my three years as a Presbyterian elder and still feel great peace from our church family. However, the last year of my three years as an HOA board member made me feel like I was back in the seventies. It has not made me want to move back to the cold winters of Canada.

While I am just as disenchanted with the problematic HOA board that took over from our team as I was with our government back in the days of Watergate, I do not feel as helpless. With the skills that I learned over many years, I know the problem can be fixed and it is just a matter of time before things will be back to normal. It will take work and a thick skin but with others standing shoulder to shoulder with me, the problem while troubling is manageable. Long ago I learned that you cannot let others hijack your institutions for their own benefit. There are times you have to stand for what you believe. I take great pleasure in knowing that many others are already standing with me and rooting for our success.

Much of what people seem to learn today is that everything goes especially if it makes their own tiny life better. Even when they make many others miserable in the process, it is justifiable because they benefit. The selfishness that drives many of these people makes no sense and I often wonder how they even sleep at night.

Only as people understand that promoting the greater good helps us all will we make true progress. Sacrificing a little of yourself for others is a grand American tradition that has been lost in much of the business culture of this country. We need to bring it back and refuse to elevate those whose only goal is success on the backs of others.

May 19, 2016

I will admit to not remembering much from long ago Sunday school lessons, but I do remember that being gracious to strangers was an important part of life. It was also important in my upbringing. My mother used to tell me stories about getting stuck on the muddy roads to Yadkin County when she visited from the big city of Mount Airy. Often she had to knock on the door of a stranger to see if they could pull her car out of a mud hole.

The door on our farmhouse in Tay Creek, New Brunswick, got many knocks during the worst snowstorms. Many late nights someone would wade through the snowdrifts to ask if I would come pull them out of a ditch full of snow. I never turned anyone down even though I knew it would mean crawling around in sub-zero weather in the snow to get a logging chain hooked to something sturdy before I put one of our 15,000 pound tractors in gear to pull the vehicle out. I never took a dime for helping these strangers.

I have lived near some crazy people in my life, but I have tried to be gracious even to the most challenging of them.

Graciousness goes farther than just helping strangers, it used to define how winners and losers treated each other. Today, it seems that many believe than spitefulness is the way to handle any interaction. If I am winning, let me rub my opponent's face in the dirt for good measure. Is it any wonder that we have a hard time coming together after an election.

Being a gracious winner or loser is part of the process of coming back together so things can get done. Taking your ball and going home is unlikely to be a way to help heal wounds that a game or an election caused. Finding something good in your opponent instead of classifying them as the devil makes life better whether you win or lose.

July 24, 2012

I have spent so much time on the road during my life that I can rightfully be accused of trying to simplify life by comparing it to driving.

A single Mercedes speeding by us recently triggered this post.

We were on Route 70 between Interstate 540 and Interstate 85 near Durham, NC. As is often the case with roads, there was some road construction, and there were lots of signs warning about the two lanes of traffic merging into the one left lane.

As I pulled over into the left lane, I could see a long line of traffic in front of me that had already merged into the left lane in an orderly fashion. Then a flash of black and chrome in my rear view mirror caught my eye. A Mercedes driver that had merged over must have decided that being at the back of the line was not for him.

I saw him quickly shoot over into the right lane and zoom down to the head of the line. It happens to be one of those things that challenge my patience and make me wish things that I shouldn't. Someone trying to get to the head of the line ends up slowing down the line because a kind soul has to to stop and let our impatient driver back into the lane.

My assumptions from this point on have nothing to do with the fact that this particular driver was driving a Mercedes. I know some very nice people who drive the same vehicle. Whether or not a higher percentage of Mercedes drivers compared to Volvo drivers try to get to the head of the line is another post.

It occurred to me that the folks who choose to try to get around everyone else in a merging lane situation are people who know exactly what they are doing and how they are inconveniencing other folks.

Yet they are willing to take advantage of others in order to meet their own needs. In a certain sense they believe they are above the rules that govern most people. In their minds it is okay for them to behave contrary to the accepted norm because they believe they are more important or special than everyone else.

It might be easy to say these people are just in a hurry, and their behavior is not indicative of the way that they might handle other things in their life. As someone who has been the leader of a number of teams, I would have to disagree. I have been in the car with Apple reps working for me and seen them pull a stunt like trying to get around a line of traffic.

It turns out that the people who I have observed zooming around traffic have all been very self centered people who tend to use other people to get what they want.

A little later in our trip, I was on a two lane road doing about 60 miles per hour when an old truck pulled out in front of me. I didn't have to slam on my brakes, but I did have to slow down to 25 miles per hour as the truck made its way one half mile down the road and turned off.

Actually it was a little more dramatic than that since there were five other vehicles behind me all doing 60 miles per hour.

In this case, the driver inconvenienced some people for a short time, but I am convinced that he was oblivious to what he had done. I didn't see whether it was an old driver or a young driver. He pulled out in front of traffic and never knew that with a little bad timing he could have been in a wreck.

My third person is the lady or fellow who is kind enough to stop and let you drive by his parking place without backing out in front of you. This is a person who is trying to do the right thing and doesn't mind adding a few seconds to his or her journey in order to not inconvenience another person.

I might use these categories to decide where to put my votes this November. I would rather have as a leader the fellow trying to do the right thing. Certainly someone who thinks he is better than the rest of us would be a poor choice for a leader.

We've already tried an oblivious leader in the not too distance past so I am not interested in voting for one of those.